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Swayze Waters tugged on new electric blue kicking shoes this season, and his leg turned into a thunderbolt.

In those blue shoes, Waters is now one of the flashiest kickers in the CFL, and he backs up that style with substance.

The Toronto Argonaut veteran was named the CFL’s special teams player of the month for July by leading all kickers in average yards per punt (46.8) and tying for most field goals made (13) and for field goal percentage (92.9). For the season, he’s been good on 19-of-22 attempts field goal attempts and averaging 47 yards a punt.

Last season, while kicking with an old shoe, a leg injury limited him to eight regular season games. He finished the season good on 18 of 25 field-goal attempts for a 72 per cent success rate.

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This year, he’s electrifying.

Of course, the blue shoes are not filled with super powers, but as long as the superstitious Waters believes in those shoes, who’s to argue?

Pro athletes are known to be superstitious and Waters is no different. He also has this thing about his socks. He often changes his socks three times a game. He’s not as fussy as he once was.

“I don’t do it every game any more, but I used to wear a pair of socks for warm-up, a new pair of socks for the first half and another pair for the second half.”

It was something he started out doing for practical reasons. As he started sweating, the socks would stretch out and he felt uncomfortable. He would get tired of pulling his socks back up.

“I still do it occasionally but it’s more of a feel thing now,” Waters said. “If I feel something’s off, I’ll do it.”

Waters, 27, would prefer the shoes to be less flashy because he doesn’t seek the spotlight on or off the field. In fact, he’s a humble man of faith from Jackson, Miss., who’s a jeans and T-shirt guy at home.

But on the field, bold is gold for him.

In college, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he wore a pair of gold-coloured cleats because his team’s colours were green and gold.

“They were kind of flashy,” he said, adding that he enjoyed his best success ever with those shoes.

Waters changed to the electric blue cleats at the beginning of the season, even though the decision did not come easily. His old cleats had worn out and the bottom was coming off, but kickers like to get a lot of mileage out of boots that feel good.

“Cleats are like gloves for kickers,” Waters said after practice at York University. He didn’t like the idea of trying on new shoes.

Adidas sent him a new pair, but Waters was shocked when they arrived.

The blue shoes came with a purple tongue and bright orange laces. Waters winced. Something was going to have to change. He would not be caught dead with those colours.

Waters “doctored them up” to make them look relatively normal, and he’s grown to like the electric blue.

The shoe is a soccer cleat, but soccer cleats don’t come in basic colours anymore. Unlike the old days, soccer footwear manufacturers turn out all kinds of flashy colours.

“They’ve been good to me,” Waters said. “I’m having a good start to the season, so I’m going to stick with them.”

Of course, Waters gets lots of ribbing about the shoe colour from his teammates, especially from Trevor Harris, the backup quarterback and the holder on Waters’ field goals.

Harris, who rooms with Waters during the season, says that Waters wasn’t enthusiastic about retiring his old cleats when they split at the end of training camp.

“He was like, ‘I gotta wear these shoes today, I guess.’ It was kind of like he would wear them to fill in for a day.’ I don’t think he wanted them to be his kicking shoes. But he came out and he was booming them.”

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